The knock at the front door came at about nine and since I was not expecting any visitors at that time of night, I ignored it. The person could obviously see lights on inside my flat and knocked again.
It was a slight young woman with short black hair, glasses, big black T-shirt and black leggings. She held a cup in her hand. There was a security gate between us.
“Hi, I'm Mia from downstairs,” she said. “Could you lend me some sugar?”
I already knew she was from downstairs, in fact in the flat directly below mine, and had been living there for maybe a month and I hadn’t made any neighbourly effort to welcome her to our small community. Her request also annoyed me. Did people in this day and age still borrow sugar? There was a 7 Eleven not more than a ten-minute walk away.
“I don't have any sugar,” I said.
“Do you have a cigarette? I've run out of those too and I'm dying for one. You know how it is?”
I did not know how it was.
“I don't have cigarettes,” I said.
She blinked at me, perhaps now realising that not only was I not being very neighbourly but there was no sign of any generosity of spirit either. The situation was awkward and the ensuing moment of silence hung unhappily in the air.
I waited. I was not about to shut my front door in her face. but I had little to bring to this particular party.
“You're being a bit of a shit, aren't you?” she said. “I live right below you and you give me this attitude as if I'm some foul beggar on your doorstep. Get a fucking life, man!”
She turned around and went downstairs. I closed the front door.
Two evenings later there was a furious row in Mia's flat. There were a high pitched hysterical female voice and a droning male voice. Things were being thrown and smashed and after thirty minutes a door was slammed and then a car pulled away with a revving engine and squealing tyres. Shortly thereafter there was a knock at my front door.
This time Mia was dressed in a little black dress, though barefoot. The hair had blonde streaks. She seemed tense and nervous.
“You'd better invite me in,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because if you don't, I'm going to rip your fucking security gate from its mounting and hurt you with it.”
I didn’t know whether Mia was strong enough to do it. She appeared to be angry enough to try. I unlocked the gate and let her in and decided not to lock the gate again in case one of us had to make a sudden emergency exit.
“You had quite a party tonight,” I said as we went into my lounge.
Mia chose the couch and tucked her legs under her. She surveyed the paintings on the walls.
“Fuck him,” she said. “Can’t you change that awful music? I'll have some coffee. Milk, two sugars. Who did all these weird paintings? Do you have a cigarette for me?”
The music was not awful at all, merely a selection of McKinley Morganfield's best recordings from the Fifties. I am quite fond of the blues in general and of the works of Mr Morganfield in particular.
“Coffee I can do,” I said, “but I don't take sugar in mine, so I don't keep sugar, and I don't smoke.”
“Fuck!” Mia said. “You're not only unfriendly and weird but you’re also useless. How can you not have sugar? What time is it?”
“Half past ten,”
Mia jumped up and headed for the front door.
“Will you walk with me to the 7 Eleven to get some cigarettes and some sugar for my coffee?”
“Excuse me?”
“I asked if you'll go with me to the 7 Eleven ....”
“I heard what you said. I was merely expressing my incredulous reaction to your request. Why should I walk with you to the 7 Eleven?”
“Because I'll buy you a fucking chocolate if you do! For god's sake I'm only asking you to walk a couple of blocks with me, okay, late at night when I'm not comfortable being out on my own. Get some humanity in you, dude!”
“It's not that dangerous around here at night,” I said.
Mia had no more to say and stomped out, inasmuch as one can stomp in bare feet. I locked the security gate behind her, closed the front door and went back to the book I was reading.
Just before eleven there was another knock. This time Mia wore some flat black shoes. As soon as I opened the door she pushed a small bag of sugar and a slab of chocolate through the bars of the security gate.
“Your prezzie for being such a warm human being,” Mia said. “Can I have my coffee with milk and two sugars now?”
Once inside, Mia walked straight back to the lounge, headed for the CDs and started flipping through my collection.
“What is this shit you're playing?” she said. “A person would think you have no taste in music. What have you got that's cool? I'll have a drink if you don't want to make coffee. It'd be nice if I could have a voddie.”
It was always good to see that a stranger could make herself at home in my humble abode. Not only inviting herself in but also immediately comfortable enough to criticise the musical tastes of her reluctant host.
“Why aren't you acting like a good host?” Mia said, “instead of standing there like a zombie. I'll sort out the music while you make the coffee if you're not going to give me a drink. Go on, get to the kitchen and do your thing and I'll do my thing, okay?”
By the time I'd made two mugs of Nescafé instant coffee, both with milk and one with two sugars, and brought them back to the lounge, Mia was once again ensconced on the sofa and we were listening to Steely Dan's greatest hits.
Mia was smoking and using one of my ornamental ceramic ashtrays as a repository for the ash. Must have given the ashtray the fright of its life. The potter had designed it for utility but I'd bought it for its aesthetic value only. I guess Mia was of the opinion that function follows form.
“Hey, where's that chocolate? I'll have some with my coffee,” Mia said. “So, tell me, did you paint all these weird pictures? How can you hang them on your walls where you live? They'd freak me out if I had to live with them. Are you a loner guy, do you have a girlfriend or are you gay?”
“They're my pictures and I like them and it's easy living with them because I like 'em. You made a lot of noise earlier this evening.”
“Did you hear us? I suppose you did. I went a little ballistic, didn't I? It's Paul, my ex-boyfriend, who was chancing his luck. We broke up two days ago. Remember the evening you were so rude to me? That was the day. But we already had tickets for this show that I wanted to see and so I told him we could go still go but that would be it, you know, just the show and then it was all over for good. Okay? When he brought me home the asshole thought he could get a little nookie for old times' sake too and when I told him no, he freaked out. I suppose that is what you heard. Was it really terrible?”
Mia did not appear to be shattered by the failure of her relationship or truly upset that I had been an aural witness to the fight. She was enjoying her chocolate, sipping the coffee and smiling brightly at me between puffs of her cigarette.
“I should perhaps apologise if I were a tad, uh, terse and uncooperative the other evening,” I said, “but I'm not good with unexpected visitors, especially not ones who come around to borrow things I do not have in stock.”
“S'all right. I was just looking for someone to talk to after the break-up and you're the only person in this block almost close to my age. How old are you, anyway? I'm twenty-four.”
“Forty.”
“Divorced?”
“No. Never married.”
“There must be something wrong with you. Oh, no, I get it, you are gay but you’re in the closet. Forty and never married. My god! If you\re always so rude to people who knock at your door, no wonder! Not even gentleman enough to go with me to the shop at night when it could be dangerous. Who would want to marry you?”
“It's not dangerous around here. For your information I'm merely between relationships and I'm not gay, if that is of any importance.”
“Important enough to make sure you tell me, hey? Just so's I wouldn't think different. As if. What are these paintings about, then, what are you trying to say?”
“I'm not trying to say anything. I've said it. It's in there. You don't have to like 'em or understand 'em.”
“Fine, fine. Hey, don't you want to go for a drink somewhere? This thing with Paul got the adrenaline flowing and I won't be ready for bed until I've had a nightcap. Come on, let's go find a place with decent music where we can have a civilised drink and talk more about your paintings and why they're so weird. And why you're so weird.”
“Not a good idea. Maybe you don't work but I do and I avoid drinking on weekday nights. We could do it on the weekend but tonight is not on.”
“What! It's not that late and it will be only one drink, okay, and for your information I do work but I'm not afraid to go out on a weekday night to have one drink with someone who asks me, and especially if that person had just broken up with her lover and needs some company.”
“I'm sorry but I don't want to go out now.”
“You could’ve gotten laid, okay. But no, you want to maintain your precious aloofness. Between relationships! Must be several years since the last one and I'll bet it'll be many more until the next one and I’m already sorry for the person. Thanks for the coffee I had to drag out of you.”
Mia flounced out before we'd even had time to listen to the last half of the Steely Dan CD. The most tangible evidence of her fleeting presence, apart from the impression of her body on the soft scatter cushions on the couch, was the lingering smell of cigarette smoke. I opened the windows extra wide to let in as much fresh air as possible to assist with the dissipation of the smell of burnt tobacco. The other reminder, of course, and perhaps the one destined to last longest, was the small bag of Hulett's sugar in the kitchen cupboard. Mia came across as tart but she had left sweetness behind.
In the grand scheme of things whatever Mia's daytime activity was, it was not synchronised to mine and our paths never crossed when I left home in the mornings or returned from work in the evenings. Frankly, this was the case with all of my neighbours.
This always amazed me, that I could live in a block of flats with six apartments sharing one entrance and if I ran into any neighbour once a week it was a lot. I could hear their comings and goings from inside my flat yet never managed to meet them on the staircase on the way in or out of the building or maybe venturing into the back to deliver my crammed black bags to the large plastic refuse containers. I did usually dump my rubbish late at night but I would have thought there would be at least a statistically significant incidence of meetings at the front entrance.
Although I was conscious of some of Mia's activities in her flat, I did not see her for a good few weeks after the night of sugar, chocolate, cigarettes and Steely Dan. She seemed to have a bit of a social life, even after the demise of the relationship with Paul, and every now and then at night there'd be loud music and raucous, drunken laughter from below, or I'd be woken up when Mia and one or more others returned home in the early hours of the morning and made more noise trying to be quiet and inconspicuous than they would have made if they had behaved normally.
Was Mia on my mind? Not constantly but yes, I did think of her on occasion especially when I opened the grocery cupboard and saw the forlorn little bag of sugar that had been so harshly separated from its siblings on the 7 Eleven shelf, only to languish lonely and unappreciated amongst the more readily consumed dry goods in my cupboard. I never saw Mia but I heard her – the opposite of what is required of the model child.
Of course it was inevitable that we would meet again. Cape Town is only so big and as it always happens in good stories, we met not halfway around the world when we were both coincidentally sunning ourselves in Cannes, but in the laundromat next to the 7 Eleven where I'd been taking my laundry for a long time on Sunday mornings without ever running into Mia.
Mia was hunched over in a plastic chair next to the last SpeedQueen in the row, in the rearmost corner, rapidly flipping through a magazine. She was either a speed reader or she could not read at all and was only looking at the photographs.
It seemed to me that Mia had not noticed my entrance into the laundromat and I decided to ignore her presence and chose my own plastic chair closer to the front, loaded the washing machine and sat down with my book.
“You spurned me, now you ignore me!”
Mia was right in front of me, arms akimbo, apparently fighting fit and furious, yet when I looked into her eyes they seemed tired and empty rather than angry. Maybe the lenses of her glasses were playing tricks with the refraction. Mia's hair was shorter than ever, practically a spiky razor cut, brilliant scarlet, and she wore a big, loose plaid shirt over jeans and large crepe soled shoes. She looked about twelve, albeit a twelve-year-old with laughter lines, except that she was not laughing at that moment.
“Hi,” I said.
“Fuck you, okay?” she said, “You must’ve seen me when you walked in and you don't have the common courtesy to greet me. I've been to your flat and bought you chocolate and everything!”
“You left the sugar behind.”
“The sugar?”
“You bought sugar for your coffee, remember? You didn't take the sugar with you when you left. I don't use sugar.”
“My god! Are you a fucking spazz or are you just a prick? Sugar! I'm making the point that you've rudely ignored me and all you can think of is some fucking superfluous sugar?”
“My mind is kind of mundane that way. Look, I was just surprised to see you here and you seemed to be absorbed in your magazine. How come you're even here? I don't recall ever seeing you here before?”
“I'm not usually up this early on a Sunday, am I? But hey, shit happens, and I was awake and so I thought I might as well come and do the laundry. If I'd known you'd be here and ignore me so spitefully I'd have stayed in bed and done it later. How long are you still going to be? My washing's about done. You can take me to Hout Bay and we can have a fish'n'chips lunch and a couple of beers. It's a nice day for driving out.”
“Correct me if I'm wrong. You are suggesting I take you for lunch in Hout Bay and perhaps pay for it too?”
“You're the guy. Guys pay for the meal and the drinks. My cash flow is a bit unhealthy right now anyway, so it will have to be your treat. Come on, I'm desperate just to get out of my flat and go somewhere and I know a nice, cheap place in Hout Bay, okay? Hake and chips and a beer. It's not that much. Please?”
That was the magic word. Mia really seemed to be out of sorts, maybe not exactly tired, perhaps just depleted. She was almost wringing her hands.
“Okay, but I'm not nearly as close to being done as you are.”
“No problem. I'll go back when my stuff is done and I'll get myself ready to go by the time you get back. Just come downstairs to fetch me when you want to go, okay? You won't forget, will you? Don't drop me again, okay?”
This did not sound like the Mia I'd encountered before, and when had I ever dropped her?
Mia scampered off to her washing which appeared to be clean and freshly done, and when she passed me on the way out I was once again reminded of my duty to collect her at home when my washing chores were a thing of the past. By and by I took my washing home, hung the wet things on the washing lines at the back, alongside a woman's things I guessed to be Mia's, had a quick shower, shaved and changed into clothes that were more appropriate to Sunday lunch than the grungy T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms I'd worn to the laundromat.
When I went downstairs to tell Mia that I was ready to hit the road, she was already outside her front door. It was difficult to tell what Mia had done to get herself ready. She wore exactly the same clothes she'd had on at the laundromat. Maybe it would have been perfectly acceptable for me to stick to the tracksuit.
“You deliberately took as long as you could, you fucker!” Mia said. “You thought if you dragged it out I would give up or are you just one of those bastards who like to stretch a person's nerves to breaking point!”
“Come on, I had to finish the washing, hang up the washing, shower and change my clothes. I hadn’t planned on going out to Hout Bay for lunch.”
“Fuck off, okay? Let's just go before I lose it and completely fuck you up.”
It was a pleasant day and the drive was pleasant. I took the route across Kloofnek, down to Camps Bay and the coastal road past Llandudno. The vast Atlantic Ocean was calm and cool blue and peaceful. Giant container ships could be seen on the horizon.
Mia had lit a cigarette as soon as we got into the car, with the barest of apologies. She kept the side window open all the way to allow the cigarette smoke to escape into the passing air when she ostentatiously turned away from me to blow out a puff of smoke. The cigarette smoke did not get into my eyes but Mia put out her butts in the car's previously pristine ashtray, instead of flinging them out of the window. She did not want to create roadside litter and preferred to mess up the ashtray that I would have to clean out as soon as I got home.
On the way I was given a brief version of Mia's life story, principally that she was from Swellendam, had barely matriculated, had spent some time in secretarial college without qualifying in anything useful, had fallen in with a work shy crowd in Cape Town and along the way had learnt the related art of tattooing and graphic art and claimed to be a mover and shaker on the local music scene as tattoo artist to the stars and graphic designer for the best and brightest in the small insular world that was punk rock Cape Town. To my considerable shame I had to admit that I had not followed the music scene for some years and that I had not yet gotten around to have some part of my body decorated by a tattoo. Mia threatened to show me some of hers but luckily they were all somewhere under her clothes and for the moment a show and tell was impracticable.
Somehow Mia earned enough money to afford the rent on a one room flat in Gardens and to keep herself in the style she'd found best suited her needs and wants. She had also accumulated an impressive list of lovers of which the guy called Paul was the latest and perhaps the most serious. He was the first man Mia had slept with on the first date and they'd been seeing each other for about six months.
Mia directed me to a tavern called Fishy Tails opposite the Mariner's Wharf complex in Hout Bay but positioned on a rise on the other side of the road. Fishy Tails appeared to be midway through a refurbishing process.
On the other hand, it could have been that I was looking at the first stage of construction, now some years old, that had never progressed because the developers had run out of money. By this I mean to say that I was not clear on one thing: was the place deliberately funky and grungy or was it merely irreversible decay? The building was rectangular and gravy. A central staircase gave access to the restaurant. To the right of the stairs there was a convenience shop of sorts, with a large glass sliding door open to the parking area, dirty grey floor tiles, a long counter and barely any merchandise.
The brightest thing about the shop was the huge Coca Cola sign on the outside wall. There was not much to the left of the staircase. It seemed to me that the developers had planned for another downstairs shop and that either no tenant had been found or that the most recent tenant had left and the landlord had boarded up the front and forgotten about the premises.
We went upstairs to Fishy Tails. There was a large bar and a few tables inside but the outside deck appeared to be the main attraction. The view from the deck made up for the lack of ambiance. On a clear day you could see way past Chapman's Peak. But only when you were standing. When we sat down a wooden “cottage style” table with benches on either side, you could not see much more than the roof of Mariner's Wharf.
The other diners looked pretty low rent to me, stone washed denims, shocking pink or lime tops and bleached blonde hair, yachting caps, mullets, hard, tired faces with lines that were completely unacquainted with laughter. I guessed that Mia and I were the youngest persons there. The waitress was older than I am. Off the shoulder blouse, too tight white jeans, sun visor with a beer company slogan and harsh, red hair. Was Mia pulling some monstrous joke on me?
“I'll have the calamari,” Mia said. “The tubes, grilled. And a glass of dry white okay? Chilled, hey, chilled!”
“With rice, baked potato or chips?”
“What do you think?” Mia said to me. “What is the healthiest option?”
“You said you wanted fish'n'chips and beer.”
“What?”
“At the laundromat, remember, you told me you wanted me to take you for fish'n'chips and beer.”
“Get a life! I changed my mind. Forget it! I'll have the rice. Is it savoury rice?”
“It's Cajun.”
“Cool! Cajun! I'll definitely have that. Can you bring the wine straight away? I'm thirsty.”
One or two of the others were giving us strange looks and whispering together. I hoped the strange looks were directed at Mia. She was the one with the scarlet spiky hairdo. I'd stuck to the original plan and ordered the grilled Kingklip, French fries and a Windhoek Lager. Consistency of purpose is a good thing.
“Do you think I look like a dyke?”
“Did a little boy try to put his finger in your hole?”
“Fuck off! Okay? I guess you can't help who you are but just try to be nice for a bit, okay? Pretend you aren't a facetious bastard for just a minute. Answer me honestly and sensibly. Do you think I look like a dyke?”
Apart from the plaid shirt, jeans, boots, boy's haircut and aggressive attitude?
“What does a dyke look like, in particular?”
“Stop it! This is a serious thing here that I want your opinion on. Paul says he doesn't like it when I wear my hair this short and when I dress like this. He says it makes me look like a dyke and he doesn't want a girlfriend who looks like a dyke even when she isn't a dyke, and he should know I'm not, from the amount of fucking we do. So, for the last time, do you think I look like a dyke?”
“How would I know? I don't move in the company of lesbians, so I can't tell you whether you look like one. As far as I can see you're a woman and your sexual orientation doesn't derive from the way you look or dress. All it is, as far as I can see, maybe, is the short hair but it still makes you look like a woman, especially with the radical colour.”
“D'you like the colour?”
“No.”
“Why not? Are you too old for it? Do you feel threatened by it? Does it offend your white middle class male sensibilities? Are you just not cool?”
“I prefer you with your natural hair colour.”
“Yeah, right. When have you seen my natural hair colour?”
“The black hair.”
“Really! The black hair! That's not the real colour. Gotcha! For your information, the real colour is brown but I don't like it. I shave, you know.”
“That's wonderful to hear. If dykes have hairy legs, surely that must distinguish you from them.”
“Not my legs, for god's sake. I mean, yeah, I shave my legs too. I meant, down there. I shave down there, and I wax. Nobody can tell that my hair colour is not the natural colour.”
“I guess it's one way of fooling them. Has anyone ever told you there is some information you need not share with relative strangers?”
“No. I finally got fucked off with Paul and his complaints about the length of my hair or the way I dress. He wants to fuck me but he doesn't want to be seen with me in public. I broke up with him last night.”
“On some past occasion you told me you'd just broken up with him.”
“I changed my mind. He apologised and the sex is good. But there is only so much good sex a person wants from an asshole.”
Our food arrived and my Kingklip was good. Succulent yet firm and flavoursome. The fries were the right level of crisp on the outside and soft inside. It could have been the Windhoek Lager but Fishy Tails looked to be a better prospect than it had seemed on our arrival. It could be that it was that most overworked of guide book clichés, the best kept secret. Our fellow diners did not look like tourists, no, more like worse for the wear locals, and they always say that it is best to eat where the locals eat.
We had more drinks and I learnt a great deal more of Mia's romantic travails with many detours to the misadventure that was the relationship with Paul, and of her great feats of creativity in the tattooing industry and of the bands she'd been following and of her general philosophy of life and whatever topic took her fancy.
Mia was never completely at a loss for words or something to talk about and in a way that made the afternoon more pleasant. My function in the whole exercise was no more and no less than acting as avid listener while Mia rambled on and on. I was not sure whether we were getting to know each other better but I was definitely getting to know more about Mia than I had thought could be strictly necessary.
In the late afternoon there was an almost unspoken consensus that I should ask for the bill and that we should head back home as we were both slightly tipsy and though it was no hardship sitting there and drinking all afternoon, there would come a time when I could be too drunk to drive. We had no idea whether there were inns in Hout Bay and, if so, whether there would be any room for us should I be too intoxicated to drive home.
Mia was silent on the drive back. I concentrated on my driving and enjoyed the silence while it lasted. At 100km/h the only sound was the regular flick of Mia's Bic.
When I'd parked the car outside the block of flats Mia jumped out and almost ran to the security door of the block but stood waiting for me to unlock it and just about ran over me to get inside the building to get into her flat where she quickly closed the door. I stood there for a while to puzzle this one out. Had Mia merely been in a hurry to get to the loo and should I knock? Or did she run away from me and made a point of shutting the door in my face regardless of the fun afternoon we'd had?
I felt stupid just standing there, neither knocking at Mia's door nor going up to my flat. Just for the sake of some kind of action I turned around and took a stroll to the 7 Eleven to buy milk. Back home I made myself a mug of strong coffee and sat on the balcony to drink it. My mind was fuzzy from the alcohol and the excitement of the day and the coffee did nothing to keep me awake.
Soon after I'd put the mug down and leaned my head against the back rest of the chair, I fell asleep
I was woken up by the loud hooting of a car in the street just below my flat. I struggled up and peered over the railing to see Mia leaving by the front gate and getting into the car. She wore a little black dress. The car roared off with a squeal of tyres and it occurred to me that this sounded an awful lot like the way Paul drove.
Once again there was a lengthy gap between sightings of Mia. Life carried on as usual for all of us. Mia had many visitors who came and went at odd hours of the night, and there were a good few loud rows in the flat below mine. I learnt to turn up the volume on my hi-fi when the first voice was raised. Unfortunately, some of these rows happened in the dead of night after I'd been asleep for some time and it would have been a double curse on the other neighbours if they'd had to listen to loud music from one flat and to loud arguments from another at three o'clock of a morning.
Security experts say that a routine is a very hazardous habit if there is a risk of ambush or assassination. My life was humdrum and my enemies few and routine helped mitigate the boring repetitions of my day and this meant that I got home at about the same time each evening. This regularity had apparently not gone unnoticed.
Mia flung open her front door as I stepped into entrance lobby of the block, literally jumped out in front of me and barred me from ascending the stairs to my floor.
“Did you complain?” she said.
Mia's eyes were fierce and unfocused all at the same time. Pretty scary. As was the strange pumpkin orange colour of her hair and the ugly synthetic looking tracksuit she had on. I did notice a familiar looking international brand logo on the top and guessed that it could well be a highly expensive ugly track suit I was too old to appreciate for the bold fashion statement it was.
“Complain?”
“Fuck you! Give me a break, okay? Did you or did you not complain about noise in my flat?”
“I did not.”
“Did you write to the letting agent to complain that I come in late at night, make noise and have noisy guests and have noisy fights with my boyfriend?”
“You do tend to be a tad loud at times. I'll admit that, but I had no idea with whom you were having the fights. And I did not write any letter to that effect. Are you going to assault me or did I pass the audition?”
“You are a supercilious arsehole, okay? What did I ever do to you?”
“Has it occurred to you that there are other people in this block who could be pissed off by your loud behaviour at late hours? People who are a great deal less tolerant than I am.”
“You stupid fuckin' arsehole. Just fuck off, okay, fuck off and die!”
Mia turned on her heels, stormed back into her flat and slammed the door. At least it was not directly in my face. I went upstairs to change and to start supper. I needed that domestic routine to calm my shattered nerves.
It did not surprise me that someone had complained about Mia; it surprised me that Mia would have suspected that it could be me. Maybe I was the only person among her neighbours that Mia considered safe to attack like that. Anybody else would have turned right around to strengthen the original complaint with this fresh evidence of the craziness of the young woman downstairs who had noise pollution issues.
Somehow dicing carrots and cleaning potatoes just couldn't do that magic emotional massage thing. I was upset with Mia for shouting at me and especially for shouting at me for no reason whatsoever. I was even more upset with myself for not shouting back.
Cooking my own supper was not going to do it. I phoned a buddy and arranged to meet her at a mutually acceptable restaurant and went out for supper. My buddy was never short of lurid tales of professional and emotional betrayal in the media world and whenever my distractedness rose to the surface I could blame it on a hard day at the office and order more wine. My spirits were not exactly lifted by the end of the evening but the alcohol offered a comfortable filter through which I could view the events of the early evening. I was in more or less a good mood when I arrived back at the block of flats.
Mia was at the entrance to the block before I could unlock the outside security door and she opened it from the inside.
“Hi!” she said. “I was wondering if I would have to stay up all night until you came home. Come in and have a drink with me. Please?”
“Hello, mum, I'm home,” I said. “Why should I have a drink with you? I can't quite put a face to the words but not so long ago I was instructed, most firmly instructed, to fuck off and die, by someone whose face seems familiar ...”
“I'm sorry, okay? C'mon, please have a drink with me. I've got beer, wine, scotch, vodka, fruit juice. Please?”
Mia had changed out of the amazing tracksuit and was now in a long, tight fitting black dress with long ruffled sleeves and with a scoop neck that would have done her décolletage proud if she'd had any. There were a couple of pointy breasts in there somewhere to judge by the visible nipples but a lusty, busty medieval wench Mia was not. A pretty anxious young woman she was.
I allowed myself to be led into Mia's flat. The flat was, to say the least, curiously decorated and furnished. I'd thought that it would have the same layout as mine above it but this was a bachelor flat. A short passage led into the large main room with two doors on the left side of the room presumably leading to a kitchen and a bathroom. The only light in the room came from maybe ten candles in various stages of meltdown in locations around the room. The walls were covered in posters that were really catalogue charts of all kinds of esoteric symbols or images. There was a large mattress on the floor on the right, with rumpled sheets and blankets, and a gigantic wall hanging with a mandala pattern behind it. There was a six-drawer vanity table with an ornate mirror in the space between the kitchen and bathroom entrances, and another table with a PC at the balcony door. There was an expensive mini hi-fi in a corner with a profusion of CD's on the floor all around it and in another corner there was a big overstuffed easy chair, the only piece of furniture in the room other than the two tables. Small stacks of books were arranged in various parts of the room. The interior of the flat was a stylist's dream of a messy college dorm room.
The only saving grace was that I could not see any dirty crockery or empty bottles or festering fast food containers. There was a whole selection of ashtrays on the floor, though.
Mia did not make any excuse for any of the mess. Obviously it was not accidental mess and confusion born of sloppiness and lack of personal standards.
“Make yourself at home,” Mia said. “What do you drink?”
“Scotch. Exactly where should I make myself at home?”
“Sit on the bed. That's where everybody sits. Put on some music while I get the drinks. You'll see it's none of that crap you listen to.”
Indeed, it was not the kind of music I listened to or owned. I was looking at a selection of CD's featuring the names of groups and individuals of whom I'd never heard, not even in passing. I could not make an informed choice. All I could do was to make a blindfolded selection. It turned out to be a collection of mellifluous guitar instrumentals with leavening by flute and tabla. The term “New Age” came to mind though I had no idea whether this was it or if I was merely adhering to a clichéd presumption. Whatever. It was not rock'n'roll as I understood the term but it was kind of harmlessly pleasant.
“You found the 'fuck me' album,“ Mia said.
Mia handed me a highball glass half filled with scotch, and some ice cubes on top, and she had a red wine glass of white wine. We sat down on opposite sides of the bed, leaning back against the wall. Mia alternated between sips of wine and puffs of her cigarette.
“I'm sorry for shouting at you earlier,” Mia said. “I was just so angry. The letting agent sent me a letter to say that my neighbours have complained about the noise I make and if there's any more noise, they'll give me notice. It's that fucking Paul. It's him. He's the reason I get so angry. We always fight, d'you know that? We do nothing but fight and fuck. And fight.”
“I take it that your break up with Paul was of short duration? He repented and you took him back, all was forgiven, and all that.”
“Yes, yes, okay, no need to rub it in. I took him back, okay? Sometimes, I don't know if you've ever had it with anybody, but sometimes I think Paul and I, we are fated to be together. We aren't good for each other, at least he is not good for me, he fucks around, fucks any chick he can impress with his alleged charm, dumps 'em, comes back here and fucks me like nothing's happened. Shit, man, sometimes I wonder how stupid I can be to stand all that shit he brings around here and thinks I'm impressed.”
“Why do you hang on?”
“I told you. It's a fate thing. We were meant for each other. There's this bond, this mystical thing that brought us together and that keeps us together. He can screw around with how many chicks he wants but he always has to come back to me. He loves me in his way, you know. And I'm mostly crazy about him, except when he fucks me off totally. We've broken up.”
“Don't cry. It's only temporary.”
“Fuck off, okay? Just fuck off! I've made up my mind. This was the last time. The girl's pregnant. She came to my flat looking for Paul. She thought he lives here. Fuck, was she surprised to see me. I can't even be angry with her, you know. We should form a support group, this girl, and all the other girls and me. We should sit around talking about our experiences with Paul, and be strong and boost each other and crap all over him for the shit he is, instead of feeling sorry for ourselves and being all pathetic and lonely and sad because he's not here.”
We finished our drinks in silence.
“I was going to have only one drink with you, just to apologise for my rudeness but fuck it, I'm going to have another drink and you're going to have another drink and I don't care if it’s a work day for you tomorrow. You're going to stay here with me. Be a gentleman and look after a lady in distress, okay?”
Mia went to the kitchen and returned with a tray with a bottle of Bell's, a bottle of white wine and ice cubes in a bowl. The bottle of wine was already more than half empty. We freshened our respective drinks.
“Do you really think I don't look like a dyke?”
“Naah. Dykes don't have funny coloured hair.”
“I'm not going to dignify that. I shave.”
“Yes, yes, we've been there.”
“Oh shut up, I'm not talking about that now. I shave my legs. I put lotion on to make them smooth. I wax my upper lip. I wax other places. I do all those things a girl must do to be all soft and feminine for a man. I've got nice legs, all smooth and soft.”
Mia jumped up and raised her dress to her knees.
“Aren't my legs nice?” she said. “Look, no hair!”
“If you want to have my informed opinion, you'll have to come over here for some hands on testing,” I said. “They look the look but do they feel the feel?”
Mia stood over me and raised the dress to mid-thigh.
I sat up and ran my left hand up her leg from ankle to knee. I put my glass down and ran my right hand up the other leg in the same way and then rested both hands on the kneecaps. Mia's calf muscles were taut, the skin was smooth and slightly oily from lotion, I guessed, and there was a hint of stubble.
Mia raised herself on tiptoes.
“I’m smooth all the way,” she said. “You gotta give me your opinion of all of it.”
Mia sounded slightly short of breath. My heart was pounding. I looked up at Mia's face. She looked straight ahead. Candlelight played on her features and she suddenly seemed at once much older and much younger than her years.
I ran a finger around the edges of each of Mia's kneecaps, then rested all of them on the knees before I took a deep breath and slowly moved my hands upwards underneath Mia's dress, fingers spread wide on the outside of the thighs, fingertips barely touching and moving up ever so slowly, ever so gently. I wanted Mia to feel my fingers softly crawling and yet not to feel the fingers moving. Mia's thigh muscles became tauter by degrees as my fingers moved up her thighs. There was a nervous tremble, a kind of minor rictus of the muscle, a fast, delicate quiver. Mia strained higher on the tips of her toes and breathed loudly.
By now I was also shifting the hem of the dress upward, like slowly lifting a curtain. My fingers slid around the curve of the outer thighs and onto the silky skin of the inner thighs and I lightly pushed her legs apart while my hands ascended in a smooth glide. Mia caught her breath. Now the hem of the dress was raised high enough that I could push my nose into the tent it made over her crotch and then for the first time I smelled the fecund smell of Mia's sexual arousal, just as my fingertips reached the centre, found no cloth barrier, skipped easily over the outer lips and came to rest in the wettest vulva it had ever been my pleasure to encounter.
Mia was sopping, dripping wet and hot and creamy and velvet all at once. She was breathing like a racing horse after a fast sprint down the straight and at last sank down on her feet so that my fingers slid even deeper into the welcoming warmth. Mia closed her thighs on my hands.
I pulled out the fingers of one hand and ran them exploringly over the mons veneris and established without a trace of a doubt that Mia did indeed shave all over. The fingers kept going until they reached a tiny ring in the round navel, gave it a quick once over and moved swiftly on until they came to rest at the base of a small, firm breast, made a brief pause there in the warm hollow, and then scooted up to tease a hugely engorged nipple. Mia was sighing and shaking and murmuring unintelligible words. For a long moment we were stationary like that, with me kneeling prayerfully and with the laying on of hands and Mia straining against my touch, and then the position became too uncomfortable for me to hold. I pulled back my hands, allowed the dress to drop down and sat back on my heels. Mia sank down on her knees, straightened her back and stared me in the eyes. I blinked.
“I like being smooth all over,” Mia said.
“I like you smooth all over, “I said. “And smoothing you all over.”
We leaned toward each other and kissed. Mia's fervent tongue slipped into my mouth and attacked my tongue with what one could only call proprietary assertiveness. Not that my tongue was an unwilling victim. Mia tasted of wine and tobacco. While our mouths were locked in position Mia deftly undid my belt buckle and pulled the belt out of the loops and then unzipped my pants and put her small, warm hand into my underpants and pulled out my very erect, very excited cock. Well, good morning, little schoolgirl!
“Hello,” Mia said as she bent forward to kiss it. That's what it was, a warm, wet kiss with a quick flick of the tip of the tongue across the sensitive head, just for the taste of it, I guess.
“I'll do you only if you do me,” Mia said. “Why are we still dressed?”
Mia stood up to pull the dress over her head, and as easily and as quickly as that she was naked. Her body was small, spare and rounded in the right places, as the old cliché has it. The breasts were pointy and pert and defined by the largest nipples I'd ever seen on a woman, though maybe the proportions were such that they seemed larger because the breast were so small. Mia's belly curved with a slight convexity, there was a plain gold ring in the belly button and below that the absence of any hair was now almost shocking. The engorged vulva was exposed and more lewdly wanton for it. Mia might have looked a little like a young girl because of the shaven mons but her hips were those of a woman albeit in miniature form compared to, say, Marilyn Monroe. Now the short hair and the weird hair colour made no difference. I felt like a king bee and I wanted to buzz around her hive. Like a crawling king snake, I wanted to crawl around her door.
The thing that surprised me was that there were no tattoos on Mia's body, at least not on any part of it that was visible to me. I would have thought that an employee of a tattoo parlour would be required to have many and varied tattoos, as a kind of walking advertisement for the joys of illustrating the flesh. Never mind. This was a question I could address later.
It took me a while longer to undress as I had to take off my shoes and socks before I could remove the pants and I suddenly felt a need to fold up my clothes quite carefully and to place them in an accessible spot on the floor next to the mattress. Mia took my longwinded method as excuse to have a loud pee in the bathroom and then went back to the kitchen and came out with a dinner plate, a Minora blade, half a plastic drinking straw and a small paper sachet.
Mia made space on the bed for the plate, shook some crystals onto the plate and started chopping them with the razor blade.
“Is that coke?” I said.
I knew it wasn't Tab.
“Naah, it's just a little speed. I like to fuck on speed. It hits quicker and is more intense and you can be sure this hasn't been diluted to shit like the coke people sell you in this town. Fuck! You can't get decent drugs anymore.”
“Um, this is, um, beyond my field of experience, I'm not so sure if this is a good thing for me to do.”
“Your field of experience? Give me a break, okay? I'm having a schnarf and if you want to get laid you're gonna have a schnarf. No way am I fucking someone who's not where I'm at, okay? If it's in your field of experience to stick your willy into me, then it is going to be in your field of experience to do some speed to peak with me while we're doing it. Any questions? Thought not. Get your nose in here, boy.”
There was a great deal of persuasive logic in that. Mia handed me the short length of plastic straw. This could be my descent into drug hell, I thought, as I bent over the plate and its four neat lines of powder. I drink champagne when I get thirsty, smoke a little reefer when I want to get high. I don't mess with no cocaine 'cause it's bound to make a mess of my brain. No, really, the worst drug habit I've ever had is a liking for a Disprin.
“Do two lines,” Mia said. “One for each nostril, in case you were wondering.”
I did two lines. With the straw firmly stuck up my nose I carefully inhaled the crystals with a series of small snorts. Almost immediately my nostrils were burning and it was an act of willpower that kept me going and stopped me from pinching the nostrils in an attempt to make the burning sensation go away. I sat back on my heels and sniffed loudly and forcefully to get the damnable drug out of my mucous tissue. It burnt like hell. I remembered reading articles on the dangerous and/or lethal ingredients such as baking powder and rat poison that drug dealers use, increase the bulk of the pure stuff, to artificially increase the volume of the goods before selling the drugs to unwary consumers like me. I recalled horror stories of unsuspecting partygoers turning blue in public toilets or private bathrooms and wondered how Mia would deal with me if I overdosed.
Naked man found in absent neighbour's flat. Cause of death: suspected drug poison. First time user took a chance, threw the dice and came up terminal loser. A hot flush engulfed my skull. Shit! Something's happening here, Mr Jones, and if I don't know what it is, it is not altogether unpleasant. Sail on, my little honey bee, sail on!
“Hey, fuckwit, give me the straw! It's not a souvenir, okay?” Mia said.
Mia was obviously more of a pro at this than I was. She bent over the plate and in two mighty snorts, with a lightning fast changeover of nostril, cleared the plate of its contents. The good girl who empties her plate gets dessert. Mia sat up and also sniffed loudly and smiled brightly at me.
“That's what I call satisfaction! Cool! Good stuff, hey? Can you feel it lifting you? Fucking amazing shit, this. Fuck me, baby.”
What can a poor boy do if he's not a street fighting man or a singer in a rock and roll band? I pulled Mia down onto the bed with me and pulled her close with one hand on the small of her back and one hand behind her head, while we kissed again. Mia's body was soft and warm and alive against mine. She flung a leg over my thigh and pressed her belly against mine and hummed deep in her throat.
My hard-on fought for a breathing space between the two crushing bodies, not quite fitting into Mia's hairless groove, not quite butting against the ring in her belly button.
The one pair of lips were vibrantly passionate but I wanted to have a taste of the other pair. Honey could not be as sweet. I drew away and scooted down and rolled Mia over on her back, hooked a palm under each thigh and got stuck into her aromatic, aroused wetness. And was it ever wet! Mia was gushing, overflowing, secreting a torrent of pungent vaginal secretion, so much so that I had to suck and swallow deep before I could slip my tongue in there and go to work.
I licked Mia's fertile furrow from top to bottom, flicked at the clitoris, went deep inside, had a little nibble, sucked the clit into my mouth, blew a little air into the orifice, and repeated the process, then settled into a slow, relentless, lapping rhythm until Mia was squeaking “oh baby, oh baby” and lifting her butt off the bed, with quivering thigh muscles and a marked tremor in the belly muscles. I looked up and saw Mia's head flung back, hands gripping the sheets on either side of her, her body almost levitating off the bed. It was most strange doing this wonderful thing, tasting the sublime bountiful flavour of overheated pussy, without getting pubic hair between my teeth. This was a luxury I could get used to. Good morning, little schoolgirl!
I lifted Mia up and turned her around with her butt in the air and her head in a pillow and gazed upon the small rosy aperture and the juicy pooched out peach of the cunt below and licked the furrow between the buttock cheeks with a great deal of delectation and dedication and rimmed Mia's asshole until I heard her whimper and moan.
I stood on my knees behind Mia, inserted a finger in her cunt and finger fucked her with it, then inserted a finger from the other hand to lubricate it thoroughly before withdrawing it and placing it at the entrance of the asshole and slowly pushing it in until I was finger fucking Mia at both holes. She pushed back at the fingers and rotated her pelvis and gasped and moaned and shouted unintelligible words into the pillow. I turned Mia on her back again and dived into her muff with more gusto and worked that thing until Mia was really shaking from head to toe and grabbing the top of my head and pulling me into her and going “fuck, of fuck, oh baby, oh baby, oh sweet baby, oh fuck” until a huge spasm rocked her body and she had a kind of epileptic fit for a minute or two, clamping my head so tightly between her thighs I thought my neck bones would crack.
There was a moment of silence and immobility before Mia sat up and pulled me up to her and gave me a bear hug of no mean proportions and swallowed my tongue again.
“Thank you, thank you,” Mia said. “What can I do to please you? What do you like? Tell me how I can be good to you too.”
I rolled onto my back and pulled Mia on top of me. She straddled my groin and placed her hands on my chest.
“Ride me like a jockey,” I said.
Mia lifted her butt, inserted me into her, bore down and rode me like a champion.
She bucked and writhed, did a curious thing where she bounced her pelvis up and down in a frantic, pistoning move that made me glad that she was as small and light as she was, otherwise she might well have pounded my pelvis to jelly. I ground my groin against hers, either rising to meet Mia when she came down or moving it anti clockwise to grind her solidly. With my hands I alternated between cupping Mia's breasts or tweaking the torridly aroused nipples or grabbing her butt and digging my fingers into the pliant flesh of the buttocks to pull Mia's lower body to me. Pretty soon we were both sweating like athletes running up some mountain and it was getting harder to get a grip on Mia's slick body and the two bodies were making lewd, sucking wet noises when they met and pulled apart.
I never say much during sex and fortunately Mia was not a screamer. She stuck to a mantra of moans and incantatory phrases like “fuck, fuck, fuck,” or “you're so hard in me, you're so hard in me” or, perhaps her favourite, “Oh baby, oh sweet baby”.
When it was close to the end for me, I pulled Mia towards me so that I could kiss her again and while out tongues were wrapped around each other, I lifted her butt off my cock and held it there so that just the tip of the cock moved in and out of her cunt, the glans just touching the outer limits of the channel and the clit and thrusting in and out rapidly as possible until I felt the tightening in my balls.
I moved slower and more deliberately for the few seconds it still took before I started spouting as if I were irrigating the desert. Then I let go of Mia's butt and she wildly drove down on me in a last frantic attempt to grind me through the mattress into the floor below.
We remained locked into position for a minute or two, both of us breathing hard and me kind of laughing from the sheer exhilaration of it all. Mia gave me a quick kiss and sunk down beside me on her back with a leg draped over my thigh. She held my hand tightly.
“You're such a considerate lover, “Mia said. “You took such good care of me.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I mean it.”
“That's why I thanked you. I'm sincere.”
“You didn't tell me what I can do for you. Tell me what you like. Anything. I don't care. I want to do something nice for you.”
I rolled over on my side and hugged Mia.
“That was good. It was very nice. I'm glad I could make you feel good, “I said.
“I didn't fake it, okay?”
The sweetest lie a woman can ever tell.
“I didn't fake it either.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha .... Fuckwit.”
“You say that as if it's a bad thing.”
“D'you like me?”
Here it comes. The inquisition to validate our passionate exchange of bodily fluids. 'Course I like you, darlin', 'course I do. You're a very special person and I am most definitely going to respect you in the morning. Maybe not tomorrow morning but some sunny day soon.
“You're okay, I suppose. Bit loud, bit aggro with me, bit wacky ....”
“I'll whack you. C'mon, be serious. All I want to know is, do you like me? I'm not asking about love, okay? Just, do you at least like me or is this just leg over for you with the crazy chick downstairs.”
My fingers ran lazy patterns over Mia's torso from breasts to belly button and beyond. Mia wriggled against me.
“You have no tattoos,” I said.
“Never said I had tattoos.”
“You work in a tattoo parlour. Allegedly.”
“That was just a put on, okay, to fuck with your mind when I didn't really know you. I don't even work at a tattoo place at all. That's Paul. He is a tattoo artist. I'm just a plain old secretary, okay?”
“With hair like that?”
“It's an ad agency and they're cool with it. D'you have a problem with my hair?”
“The hair you have or the hair you don't have?”
“Yo, fuckwit, just there you did not seem to have any problem at all dealing with the lack of hair in a certain part that shall remain nameless. But just follow your fingers.”
“Do you still wonder if I'm gay?”
“Oh yeah! Quite gay. You've evaded the question. Do you or do you not like me?”
“I like you.”
“Kiss me and we’ll see how gay you really are, bum boy.”
We kissed and as one thing leads to another the other thing leads to an inevitable conclusion and not very much later we were merrily fucking again. I was amazed at my continued strength and stamina. Must be the drug. Love could be a drug but in this case it must have been the amphetamine that kept me bucking like a red bull.
We did more of the same and more of the different and then collapsed in a sweaty, tired heap. My bodily functions were exhausted but my mind was racing and what I was mostly wondering was how soon I could make a decently timed exit to go home, have a bath and get into bed.
Mia got up, lit a cigarette and poured more drinks and proposed a toast “to us”, whatever that was supposed to mean, and snuggled up to me with a drink in one hand and the smoke in another, and prattled on. My heart was pounding again and this was not lust or infatuation. My scalp was itching and it was not dandruff. I was tense and nervous and just couldn't relax and it wasn't psycho killer by the talking heads. I wanted to get up and do something, go somewhere, and I didn't want to do it with Mia or take her there. It was time to get the fuck out.
Without further ado I moved Mia's arms away, got up and started dressing.
“You can't go home now. C'mon, baby, stay here with me. It's so nice here with you. Don't you want to fall asleep in my arms?”
Not really. I want to go to sleep in my bed.
“I don't sleep well with somebody else in the bed. It's not you. It's like that with everybody. I'm tired and I want to go home to my own bed. Tomorrow, I mean later today, is still a working day for me.”
“Please stay until I fall asleep? Just until I fall asleep, okay. It's so nice to fall asleep when I know there's someone else here. It makes me feel secure. Hold me until I fall sleep, please?”
If this woman felt the way I did she was not ever going to fall asleep. But it was highly impolite and churlish to bugger off into the night just after sexual satisfaction. Mia was not asking much, just for daddy to stay around until she was happily wandering around in dreamland.
Fully clothed I lay down behind the naked Mia who had turned on her side, and held her while she snuggled into the mattress. I lay perfectly still and concentrated on breathing slowly and deliberately to promote tranquillity into Mia's body and mind by osmosis so that she'd fall asleep. Pretty soon Mia was breathing through her mouth, very still and relaxed and asleep. I stayed in position for another few minutes, just to make sure, before I carefully disengaged my arm and got up to leave.
I was still not sleepy. Back in my flat I put on a 'best of Cream' compilation and put headphones over my ears to blast the delirious improvisational psychedelic rock and blues into my synapses while I came down from my frenetic high. The sunshine of your love is a strange brew indeed and I'm so glad you kept me rolling and tumbling from four until late. Was it a spoonful of your precious love in the white room down by the station where we danced the night away in a world of pain where we were going wrong and that turned me into a politician who's just not playing when it comes to a fight? Maybe she was like a bearded rainbow once the sweet wine turned sour and I went down to the crossroads like a toad to flag a ride to the deserted city of my heart at sleepy time time.
Dawn broke while I was sitting in my easy chair with Eric, Jack and Ginger doing their virtuoso thing at ear-splitting volume directly into my ears. I had no answer to the conundrum posed by Mia. There would be no sleep and all I could do was to take a hot bath, perform my morning toilette and go to work early. It was not a good day. By midday I was tired and irritable and found that as high and excited I'd been during the night, as low and miserable I became the longer the day dragged on. I felt depleted, drained, depressed. The crappy details of my job were of no assistance in defeating the downward spiral.
It struck me that the correct thing would be to phone Mia. The morning after phone call. Didn't know her phone number though. Didn't even know whether she had a phone. What else then? Take her a lovely bunch of flowers when I go home after work?
Were we officially lovers for life or the closest brief equivalent, or had it merely been a revenge fuck designed to mitigate the loss of Paul. I was not completely sure I liked Mia that much. Or if she liked me half as much. This was called getting the Fear.
Pretty stupid fear at this moment in time, this point in time, this here and now, when all it had been was one night of drunken, drugged sex with a recently single woman who was probably using me for no more than a loneliness banisher and a kind of human dildo. Oh yes, these were rationalisations for avoiding Mia like the plague, for making flimsy excuses when I did run into her, for basically just running like hell, without reason or dignity or purpose.
First step was not to go home straight after work. I stopped off at a friend's place and shot the shit for a while, made arrangements with another friend to meet for supper and went off to a late-night bar afterwards and eventually came home when all was dark in Mia's flat.
There was a piece of paper that could have been a note pinned to my front door. I crumpled it up without reading it and tossed it into the garbage bin.
The next day after work I was picked up by my girl buddy and she drove out to Llandudno where we had a picnic on the beach and watched the sunset and then went to the movies and afterwards drove out to Obs to check out a couple of new bands. Once again I came home well after lights out at Mia's.
That's how it was for the rest of the week. I must say I was slightly distressed that Mia apparently made no effort to contact me; no more ambushes at the front entrance. What was the point of laboriously evading a woman who was so easily evaded?
My evasive tactics lasted a week before I got tired of them. Mia would have got the message by then and I wanted to go home straight after work again for a change and spend a few evenings at home.
Mia spent her evenings at home too, judging by the loud music coming from her flat and the occasional loud voices shouting out joy or fury or both. The sugar and cigarette situation must have been up to scratch. There were no knocks at the front door as prelude to a request for the borrowing of the small necessities of domestic life.
By and by I stopped tip-toeing past Mia's flat on my way in or out of the building and relaxed into accepting that I would not be troubled by her anymore. For all I knew Paul was back in Mia's life.
Every now and then I have an impulse to go down to the 7 Eleven after supper to buy a chocolate bar to enjoy with my post-prandial cup of tea. Must be an irregular sugar craving. I had just straightened up after selecting my choice for the evening from the shelves at the rear of the shop when I spotted Mia at the till point. Her hair was considerably longer than the last time I'd seen her, dark brown and in a state I would have called a normal stylish haircut for an attractive young woman of affairs. She wore a chic black pants suit and open necked white blouse. The hip and cool young professional woman. Not the kind of look that would go down well at the tattoo parlour.
Mia turned around to catch me staring at her. She returned the stare but made no gesture of recognition or other concession to the fact of our previous acquaintanceship. She took her cigarettes and change and left the shop. Just in case Mia was waiting outside to accost me when I was not expecting it after getting the brush off, I hung around inside the 7 Eleven for a while longer, inspecting the goods on the shelves as if I were a professional stock taker in search of the missing overhead. Of course, there was no sign of Mia when I stepped outside the shop.
Sometime in the next few months Mia moved out of the building and the only reason I knew that she was gone was because I happened to arrive at the front entrance at the same time as a middle aged man I'd never seen before but who had a key to the gate and unlocked it and waited for me to enter before he swung it shut. He unlocked the front door of Mia's flat with the air of the legitimate occupant. It made sense to me then why Mia's presence had been so unobtrusive for such a long time.
At the start of the Christmas holidays I did a thorough cleaning of my kitchen and came across a small bag of Hulett's sugar at the back of the grocery cupboard. The sugar was a solid, hard mass. I threw it away.
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